POP MUSIC

'Journeys' with Neil Young

The concert film with Jonathan Demme, along with a new album, are just the start of a busy few months for the rocker.

Neil Young in the movie "Neil Young Journeys." (Declan Quinn, Sony Pictures…)

"Neil Young Journeys," the new concert film reuniting the idiosyncratic Canadian rocker and director Jonathan Demme, raises the notion of "spitting distance" to a whole new level.

While filming Young in concert last year at Massey Hall in Toronto, Demme employed microphone-mounted cameras to capture the performance from unusual angles, including close-ups of Young's mouth. In the middle of the song "Hitchhiker," which traces the musician's life story from his early years in Canada through rock stardom in the U.S., saliva lands directly on the camera lens.

"I thought it was pretty psychedelic -- all the colors are spewed around and everything," Young, 66, said with an enigmatic smile. He was seated on a sofa at his Beverly Hills Hotel suite on a recent trip through town to shoot a music video. "That's how close you are -- dangerously close."

Demme too never thought twice about replacing that shot. "When he sings a song about every single drug he's ever taken and, while singing it, gobs the lens and creates a psychedelic effect, it was almost like a mandate to use it," Demme, 68, said in a separate interview from his home in Rockland County, N.Y.

For The Record Los Angeles Times Tuesday, June 12, 2012 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 News Desk 1 inches; 31 words Type of Material: Correction Neil Young: An article about rock musician Neil Young in the June 10 Arts & Books section misspelled the last name of Young's former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Richie Furay as Foray. For The Record Los Angeles Times Sunday, June 17, 2012 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part D Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 28 words Type of Material: Correction Neil Young: A June 10 Arts & Books article about rock musician Neil Young misspelled the last name of Young's former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Richie Furay as Foray.

The film -- which opens June 29 for limited theatrical runs in L.A. (at the Nuart) and in New York and will screen during the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival this month -- is just one of many projects Young has coming to fruition over the next few months.

His first album in nine years with Crazy Horse, "Americana," was released last week and will be followed by another Neil Young & Crazy Horse album this fall. Young commissioned street artist Shepard Fairey to create 11 paintings -- one for each of the new album's songs -- that will be on exhibit June 28 through July 14 at Hollywood's Perry Rubenstein Gallery. Oct. 1 will bring the publication of Young's first book, "Waging Heavy Peace." Music and art aside, he's also still perfecting his LincVolt -- a conversion of a 1959 Lincoln Continental into a green electric vehicle -- as well as organizing the annual Bridge School benefit concerts he oversees with his singer-songwriter wife, Pegi.

As for the new film, "Neil Young Journeys" reflects the ongoing relationship between the respected auteurs Young and Demme. Though from different artistic genres, they worked together on the 2006 concert film "Heart of Gold" and 2010's "Neil Young Trunk Show."

"Heart of Gold," shot not long after Young had undergone brain surgery in 2005 to relieve a potentially life-threatening aneurysm, seemed to emphasize the therapeutic and restorative properties of music. "Neil Young Trunk Show," visually much grittier than the warm look of "Heart of Gold," underscored the visceral energy central to a rock 'n' roll performance.

With "Journeys," Demme appears to sidestep the fan perspective to hone in on the experience of playing music, lingering generously on shots of Young's hands as they work different guitars and keyboards, his mouth as he sings, his face as he wrestles with questions posed in his lyrics, including, "When will I learn how to give back?/ When will I learn how to heal?" as he does in "Rumblin'."

Demme, whose 1984 documentary of Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense tour has long been regarded as one of the best concert movies ever made, said his approach in marrying music and film is fairly simple: "My role, in a performance film," he said, "is to try to think and feel like the artist, so that the visuals become as much a reflection as possible of the film's themes and the stories that are coming from the storyteller."

Young, however, makes it sound as if he's almost the hired help. "Jonathan's the artist here; I'm just the performer," said Young, who's assembled numerous concert films over a career that stretches back nearly five decades. "When I'm working with Jonathan, I pretty well give myself up and do what he wants to do."

The 2010-11 tour documented in "Journeys" was built around songs from his Daniel Lanois-produced album "Le Noise," supplemented by a handful of cornerstone songs from his deep catalog. In the new songs, he reflected on the loss of friends over time, the value of family, the importance of cultural traditions.

"It's much like my 'Harvest' period, inasmuch as the intensity of the inner workings of whatever I'm doing, it's reflective," he said. "The songs are personal, the performance is very personal, yet the instruments are very unusual."

He's referring to guitars specially prepared by Lanois in ways unlike audiences are used to hearing them -- technology that heightens their musical range and sonic richness. Young also has incorporated into the film new audio playback technology he's developed to capture the full dynamic range of the music as heard by the live audience.